This Keeps Up I'll Need Support Hose

This is the problem with a blog, you have to feed it.

I resumed my weekend subscription to the Times what with the summer being over and whatnot, so I've been trying desperately to get the papers read before the next week's arrive.  A losing battle that, but I mention it because you'd think that I'd have something in the political or cultural world to rant about, declaim on because I'm reading.  But I don't.  Others do it so well anyway, and one of these days when I take the next lesson in How to Blog, I'll start adding sites I really really like and they can say it for me.

I called this Dispatches From Middle Age because this middle age is a time like no other.  Not dead yet, but you take life for granted at your peril.  One of the the things settling into middle age causes you to do is fret about physical calamities large and small.  (Add a dash of not having health insurance and whoo-whee, more's the fun.)  For now my greatest pre-occupation is my amazing feet which are starting to resemble ham hocks.  You see, I have had hypertension for longer than I've had children.  Sometimes it's up; sometimes it's down.  I can no longer control it with diet and exercise alone.  Believe you me, that train has left the station.  I need diet, exercise and expensive meds.  Lately I've been lazy in my diet and it shows.  I've been lazy with my exercise and my body knows it.  But, I still had my 2 meds -- one relaxes my veins, the other causes my body to immediately siphon off water and direct me to the nearest bucket.  So, when my feet began swelling so badly that they looked like a couple of watermelons with toenails I got concerned.  It's happened before, but only if two conditions existed:  1) the temperature is 90 degrees or more or 2) I run out of the aforementioned diuretic.

Lately, the weather's been lovely -- just another perfect September in the northeast.  I always think of these days as a reward for having survived another summer.  And, unless the last few pills in the bottle were placebos, I was still taking my daily diuretic.  Yet my feet kept growing so that by day's end my skin was taut.  The logic of the damned always kicks in for me in moments like this and I went on a mini-bender of pretzels and processed food (which by definition has tons of salt in it).  And guess what?  Down the feet went from size 666G to a mere size 100D.  That lasted for a day or so and up they went again.  I haven't had this much fun walking since I was in the end-stages of pregnancy.  Each morning I weigh myself and each morning I am 2-3 lbs. heavier than the morning before.

Before Metro North makes me pay for 2 seats I'm going down to New York to see the very same internist I so blithely told I wouldn't be seeing anymore because I'd find someone here and that I'd have insurance.  (My last insurer only covered New York residents.)  That was six months ago and neither assertion is even close to being true.


In middle age, correction, in life, we learn:  It's always something.  Once I have some kind of answer to the latest something I'll turn my attention outward.